


De Profundis

by nicky69



Category: J2 - Fandom, RPS
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Hurt Jensen, Hurt Jensen Ackles, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kidnapped Jensen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 16:11:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15319230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicky69/pseuds/nicky69
Summary: Jensen knows he’s going to die here, alone in this mean little room, and all he feels is an overwhelming sense of sadness and regret.





	De Profundis

**Author's Note:**

> A tiny fic that's been sitting on my HD for a while now, and the first thing I've written in literally years. Read at your own risk, for I am the Queen of purple prose.
> 
> J2 RPS, AU, hurt teen Jensen, tiny fic,
> 
> Warning for past child abuse, extreme hurt Jensen, purple prose. All of the violence and abuse takes place off screen.

De Profundis  
By nicky69

 

Jensen knows he’s going to die here, alone in this mean little room, and all he feels is an overwhelming sense of sadness and regret. Sadness that he’ll never see his family again, never get the chance to tell then just how much he loves them. He took so much for granted, home, school, friends. Planning for a future that now he’ll never see, and there is so much left unsaid between them, so much left undone.

The days behind him are a catalogue of horrors he wishs he could forget, and the days ahead, the few he has left, hold nothing more than a slow, painful slide into the grave. Wrapped in darkness, both literal and figurative, his only companion is the sound of his own tortured breathing and the erratic beating of his heart. 

Every bit of him hurts, inside and out. New bruises overlap old, his body a diary of cruelty and abuse, where the sunset reds and purples of recent injury fade into green and yellow of earlier wounds. There is never enough time here, never enough food, never enough rest to allow him to heal properly.

He feels as though his world has been nothing but pain since he was brought here. Endless days filled with boredom, anxiety and fear, only broken up by sharp intervals of absolute terror and torture.  
He’s been alone for days now, he thinks. How many is hard to tell in the complete darkness of his prison, where minutes and hours have long since lost their meaning, and pain and hunger and thirst are the principle factors that now govern his existence.

However, the tight pinch of scabbed over cuts on his back tell him it’s been days rather than hours since his captors last visit and the man has never left him alone for such a long period of time before; something is wrong.

Jensen’s empty belly cramps, crying out for food, but hunger is nothing new here, the twist of pain in his gut an old familiar friend. The overwhelming thirst, however, is something new. His tongue feels swollen and heavy in his mouth, bone dry like the rest of him, and his cracked lips bleed sluggishly, blood thick like tar in his veins. 

When he finds he can no longer bear the crushing loneliness and fear, when frustration and anger give way to grief at his impending fate he screams into the void; a broken dirge for a battered, worn-out soul. The darkness swallows the sound, as surely as it has swallowed him.

His head aches, an incessant throb in time with his fading heartbeat and his mind drifts, dreams and reality blurring as he fades in and out of consciousness.He dreams of a place where he isn’t scared all the time. He dreams of sunlight and birdsong, and the gentle caress of the wind on his skin. He dreams of his moms chocolate chip cookies still warm from the oven, they taste like home and happiness and hope. When he wakes in darkness their memory tastes bitter on his tongue, hope died here a long time ago.

It hurts to breathe. 

It hurts to breathe and he wants to cry, because he’s going to die here, alone. All that he is, all that he yet could be, lost. His body crumbling into dust like the petals of a pressed flower, trapped in the pages of some dusty old book, forgotten. It’s not fair.

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It’s late, 1 am when Chad and Jimmy creep through the empty streets of the neighbourhood towards their goal. Ahead lays the home of the neighborhood grouch. He’d been notorious for shouting at the kids in the area to keep of his property and as children will do they had called him ogre and monster and warlock. 

It was said he had a kings ransom stashed away in his basement, and that he kept piles of cash hidden all over his house. More outlandish tales said that he sacrificed animals on an alter in his basement and that he liked to dance naked under the moon. It is nothing but trash talk, just kids making shit up to scare each other, but still they walked past his house a little quicker than the others on the street and dared each other to run up and ring his bell and then run away. 

The man is gone now. Killed in a car accident a week before and in his absence they have grown bold. Daring each other to break into his house and find the treasure that he was rumoured to have on his property. Egged on by their friends, and fueled by teenage bravado and recklessness, they creep through the night, camera phones clutched tight in their sweaty hands, filming to prove their courage to their friends.

It is easy to get in, a rock to the glass plane in the back door and they are in. The house is silent of course, and they make their way slowly through to the front of the property. They don’t get far before they spot the door that leads to the basement. It is locked not only with a key but with bolts top and bottom and suddenly the rumored treasure doesn’t seem so outrageous. With shaking hands they throw the locks. The smell hits them immediately, and they gag, fear taking a hold anew and they falter in the open doorway before finding their courage and descending the stairs. 

When they reach to bottom they pan their phones around the room looking for a safe or an altar, something to show their friends. What they find is more precious than silver or gold, and a horror that will stay with them till their dying day.

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Officers Dolan and Johnson get the call at 1.37 am. It is their only call on a quiet midweek night, a dead body reported in the basement of a home. It’s probably a prank, just kids playing around but they are honour bound to check it out. Once they arrive at the address a quick search of the property reveals broken glass, an open back door and two teenage boys, white faced and shaking.  
There is a puddle of fresh vomit just outside the open door, pungent and disgusting and the officers began to re-evaluate their first impression of the call.

While his partner talks to the kids, Officer Dolan does a quick sweep of the up and downstairs, not expecting to find much, he knows the home owner had passed away the previous week. When finished, he re-joins his partner at the kitchen door, nodding to show that the house was all clear. Officer Johnsons face is grim.

“The basement,” is all he says, and the two officers move as one to check it out.

The power is still on in the house, but flipping the switch does nothing, so the officers draw both their firearms and their torches before beginning the descent to the basement. The smell hits them hard, the musky scent of unwashed bodies, human waste and decay, growing stronger the deeper in they go. The room is pitch black, sepulchral, the only sounds audible are their own cautious footsteps echoed back on the still air. 

When they reach the floor, as the boys before them had, they panned the room with their torches, narrow beams of light chasing shadows ahead of them, before finding in the furthermost corner from the stairs what appears to be the body of a child laying crumbled by the wall.

Immediately both men make their way over, torchlight beams bouncing helter skelter, before coming to settle on the still form before them. When they are within touching distance, Officer Johnson reaches out to see if he can find a pulse and to his surprise finds that despite the coolness of the flesh that there is a weak heartbeat present. After a moment’s hesitation he drops to his knees to administer what aid he can, while his partner radios for both the EMT’S and for backup.

While they wait for help to arrive, Johnson stays with the child, while Dolan manages to get the lights working and waits outside for the EMT’S. The sight that the light reveals is both pitiful and unspeakably sad. What the teens had taken for a corpse is actually the horribly injured body of a boy who appears to be not much more than a teenager himself. 

The boy is naked, filthy, his emaciated body curled into a loose foetal position, his hands bound tightly together in front of him. His wrists are bruised and swollen, dried blood testament to his ultimately futile attempts to free himself. The rest of his body, what can be made out beneath the filth that clings to him like a second skin, is in a similar condition and a brief glimpse of his back shows a history of abuse that in sickening in its thoroughness.

The boys eyes are dark coals in his sunken, sallow face, it’s no wonder the teens mistook him for a corpse, and his skin is pale and fragile looking. His half open mouth is bruised and swollen, cracked lips bleeding sluggishly, his thin chest rising feebly on each torturous breath. There is dried blood between his thighs and on the back of his legs and Johnson has to swallow back bile at the implications of that one injury.

His time on the force has brought him into contact with some truly evil people, and he had thought that he had seen the worst of man’s inhumanity to man; however, he would never forget the final indignity that has been visited on this poor child. Around his bruised and bloodied neck, embedded so deeply that the skin has started to grow over the metal is a choke chain, and that in turn is attached to a short chain that is padlocked to the wall. 

The poor wretch has been left, beaten, starved, and chained in the dark, like an animal. It is too much, even for a soul as hardened to life as Officer Johnson, and as he holds the frail and damaged body of this nameless child in his arms, he weeps at the unfairness and the horror of it all.

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Jensen is dreaming again. Swimming just below consciousness he feels warm and comfortable. He can hear his mother’s voice as she reads to him his favourite childhood stories. His eyes flicker open briefly and close again, it’s a good dream. 

When they open again some unknown time later he finds a room, dimly lit but not dark, and beneath his unbound hand are not rough concrete but cool, clean sheets. His mother’s voice is still present, a little hoarser sounding than before, but still rising and falling in cadence as she recounts the tales of dragons and magic that were the staples of his childhood.

Fleetingly, Jensen wonders if this is heaven, if he died back in that black pit as he thought he would, but no, this cannot be heaven. Because now that he’s listening he can hear the tremble in his mother’s voice, the fatigue and the worry, and with difficulty he turns his head to find her slumped in a chair beside his bed, a well-worn paperback clutched tightly in her hand. She licks her finger as she turns the page and the memory of her reading to him when he was a boy is suddenly so sharp and clear in his mind that he finds himself reaching for her hand, seeking comfort as he did as a child.

“Momma?”

The name slips unbidden from Jensen’s cracked lips, and damaged throat, a question, a plea, a benediction. 

Her voice stutters to a halt, the book in her now lax hand falling forgotten to the floor and she turns wide eyes to Jensen’s face. She looks older than the last time he saw her, her face pinched and sad. She looks worn thin with the years that stretch between them, the fear and pain and worry stealing her youth, but not her beauty. 

“Jensen. Baby.”

There is an endless moment of indecision before she lurches forward towards him and he flinches away as best he can, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her arms gather him up, mindful of his injuries but strong as steel, and all Jensen can hear is her repeating his name over and over, a litany of love. 

His nose is pressed into her neck and she smells like stale coffee and hand sanitiser, but beneath that she smells like home and everything that has ever been bright and good in his world. When they pull apart there are tears in their eyes, both of sorrow and of joy, but they shine with a rekindled hope.

When Jensen’s father returns to the room five minutes later, two cups of vending machine coffee clutched in hands he is rendered speechless by the tableau before him. Mother and son reunited, wrapped up in each other, both clinging to the other wordlessly, but the sense of joy that suffuses the room is almost palpable. 

The years behind have taken their toll on all of them, helplessness and the fear grinding away at their very souls. For too long their lives and their hearts have been frozen, one miserable day bleeding into another, as they waited for news of their boy. At times it felt as is if the overwhelming doubt and fear would crush them, but against the odds they have prevailed and now it seems a new, brighter day has finally dawned.

He stands stranded in the doorway, unable to do more than drink in the sight of his son, finally awake, finally home. There will be time for doctors and policemen later, for now he wants nothing more than to close the door behind him and lock out the world to keep his child safe. He wants to exist forever in this moment of joy. 

Things won’t be easy, he knows that. The cold reality of the situation whispers in his ear of the yawning gulf between then and now, and he knows that the days and months and years ahead will be filled with unwelcome revelations, readjustments and tribulations. The past two years may be over, the monster who stole their son gone but not forgotten, but finally he has his boy back. They have their boy back, and no matter what is to come, that is all, Jensen is all that matters, and in his chest his frozen heart begins to beat again.


End file.
